People often mill around The Stewpot off Young Street at Park Avenue. Downtown cleanup crews spend hours every morning picking up trash in the area from there to the Bridge Homeless Recovery Center and an Interstate 30 overpass where people are known to camp out.

Kourtny Garrett, CEO of Downtown Dallas Inc., said the streets around The Stewpot have "been one of our most challenging areas of downtown."

"We're still at a transition in that neighborhood from one that didn't have as much activity to one that does," she said.

The Farmers Market resident said she is optimistic that Snitzer can work with the neighborhood to solve the problems.

Brenda Snitzer walks the halls at The Stewpot offices that features work from the agency's art program.

(Ben Torres/Special Contributor)

Snitzer says she is meeting with business owners and neighborhood groups to hear their concerns but says the solution has to be more than moving homeless services away from the city's center.

"Do we want economic development in our city? Yes, we do," she said. "But we can't just keep moving the problem around."

In December, the Dallas City Council passed a nuisance abatement ordinance that allows police to shame properties where "habitual criminal activity" occurs by posting a sign outside.

The K2 problem has plagued downtown the past two years. Last year, downtown safety patrol officers responded to 6,000 K2 calls, said Martin Cramer, vice president of public safety for Downtown Dallas Inc.

Nonprofits like The Stewpot are trying to offer help to the Dallas homeless population to fix these problems, but such groups are also blamed for drawing homeless people closer to the city's hub.

It's a "chicken vs. the egg" issue. Which came first? The homeless people or the nonprofits trying to help them?

Ultimately, none of that matters to Snitzer. She just wants to fix the problem, not point fingers.

"The Stewpot since the '70s has been trying to help people in these communities where nobody else was helping them," Snitzer said.

Part of fixing the problem comes down to knowing how to work in concert with other nonprofits.

At the start of her career, while working as a probation officer, Snitzer was frustrated there was no database or list of the social services available in Dallas. She often didn't know where to send the people she was trying to help.

Those services are still fragmented, and newly homeless or at-risk people often turn to The Stewpot to figure out what to do.

This week a man told her, "I'm newly homeless. I don't know how to navigate a lot of this stuff."

Snitzer now knows which nonprofits do what in Dallas and has even worked at several of them, including Our Friends Place, Girls Inc. and Big Thought.

She hopes to bring those groups together.

No matter how experienced Snitzer is, there's little to prepare someone for balancing working with the city and people who want homeless people out of sight, said Wayne Walker, executive director of OurCalling, a homeless outreach center.

"The politics involved is ugly," Walker said.

Unsheltered homelessness is expected to increase again this year, at a time when affordable housing is limited. OurCalling sees 250 new unsheltered people each month.

"The need far exceeds our available resources every day," Walker said. "Think about the unsheltered — where can they go for any services? ... The Stewpot has filled in a really unique gap."